Three Conversations About the Columbia Protestors

I have no doubt that my outspoken opinions on the war in Gaza and its implications have won me few favors among my peer group. Disproportionately pro-Palestine and indignant at the older generations for their support of a state that has steadily decayed into barbarism, young people, especially those pursuing a university education, have grown increasingly frustrated with the perceived inaction of the United States to bring about a ceasefire to this war. It has captivated the world over for encapsulating so many global flashpoints, for the war itself demands comment on everything about our global order today. Themes of inequality, American hegemony, bigotry, imperialism, and genocide, both historic and ongoing, pervade conversations surrounding this war. It is the sort of global event that overrides logical deliberation and defaults to tribal identification. In the grand scheme of things, it is a small event in a small corner of the world, directly affecting relatively few people; and yet any tension between Israel and Palestine must entail visceral reactions on account of what these two states represent in the eyes of their supporters and opponents.  In these United States, no event has more succinctly captured the doggedness and rage of college students at the conduct of the war than the recent string of pro-Palestine protests that have flared up across the hallowed greens of elite universities.

I had my first conversation about these protests with my friend who attends the University of Florida in Gainesville. He’s left-wing and enjoys his casual activism: he makes various posts to his Instagram story reminding his followers of the crimes committed by the Israeli government in Gaza on a regular basis, usually in the late hours of the night or the early hours of the morning. Today, he posted a reel juxtaposing Speaker Mike Johnson and President Lyndon B. Johnson concerning their similarly unsympathetic views of protests occurring on college campuses in their respective eras. He goes by he/they pronouns and is considering transferring to a university in Europe so that he can continue his study of linguistics.

In our conversation, he expressed his strong support of the protestors at Columbia University. “Kent State shan’t happen again,” he said. “It won’t,” I replied. I claimed that Kent State is different, that Kent State was a relatively minor school in Ohio protesting grievances that directly affected people in their age demographic in their communities. They had a stake in the fight. They were protesting for all their high school classmates, brothers, and cousins in Vietnam who couldn’t. For all their shenanigans, for all their threats and arson attacks, they had skin in the game at the very least. They were putting themselves on the line for their peers. I could respect that. I couldn’t do the same for random upper middle-class socialist #3629. I couldn’t do the same for someone who’s protesting because they read an article in Jacobin and uses she/they pronouns to make a statement about gender normativity. I couldn’t do the same for someone who is so thoroughly drenched by their privilege that they deny their fellow students their campus, someone who knows that daddy’s money will pay for any indiscretions. For them, this isn’t war: it’s film studies. “You lack the communitarian global spirit!” he said. And I do.

 Campus protests at Columbia (AP Photo/Stefan Jeremiah)

In the next conversation, I spoke with a friend of mine who lives in Izmir and attends Boğaziçi University. He studies political science and international relations, and he enjoys thinking about agriculture in Taiwan. Once a hardened nationalist, a university education has softened his disposition. Always a critic of the Erdoğan government and its authoritarian tendencies, he has come to see an enlightened, English liberalism as Turkey’s only hope to avoid relapsing into dictatorship time and time again. With his newfound respect for Henry David Thoreau, he has become enthralled with the idea of civic disobedience and has protested at his own university against the Islamist government’s interventions on his university campus.

While he has been shocked at the violence with which some American universities have reacted to the protestors, he doesn’t care for the protestors or their motives. “They are protesting because side X is getting beaten pretty badly by side Y in a conflict 8000 km away.” He doesn’t trust mere convictions. “I don’t think they will hold for much longer.” To these protests, he is an atheist; so he refuses to pray towards the idols. The institutions are tin-pots, and the protestors are incompetents. When Columbia shut down their campus, it was a “signature authoritarian move”. When Columbia offered the protestors a pardon in exchange for moving their protest to an authorized location, he lamented that the protestors were so wrapped up in performance that they forgot to do politics: “They should have built that coalition”. In his country, he said that they would have. They would have made their protests sustainable by making friends among the administration, the professors, and alumni. Now, the fools will be crushed, so he theorizes.

In the last conversation, I spoke to my co-worker, a fellow intern at the state capitol of Oklahoma. A staunch feminist and a leftist, she has high ideals tainted only by a basic sense of reality. A student of gender studies on the verge of graduation, she has increasingly found herself at odds with her less pragmatic counterparts. She believes in everything they believe: unfettered abortion access, universal healthcare, and trans children. But she doesn’t want to be the one chanting outside: she wants to be the one getting things done on the inside. She’s ‘selling out’ in the eyes of her comrades because she believes that the institutions of government are too important to ignore for any social movement. No matter how gross she finds the process, she wants to learn how to make sausage.

She believes strongly in the virtues of protest, and she believes strongly in its effectiveness, crediting protest with everything from civil rights to gay rights to abortion liberalization. If my Turkish friend is an atheist, she is a devotee. I say that protest is ineffective. She says it is our one hope. I say that their methods are performative. She says that clearly they’ve caught our attention. I say that they have no stake in the case at hand. She says that they are admirably using their privilege. She comes from an upper middle-class background, and I think when hears of socially liberal protestors at elite universities, she cannot help but see herself in them. In a conversation about why so many of her colleagues are artists and activists rather than administrators and lawyers, she said that they have been so historically marginalized by our institutions that she can’t blame them for not wishing to drink the Kool-Aid. “If their methods are so effective,” I remark, “surely oil companies would be astroturfing more often.” She shrugs, having concluded from the outset that she won’t change my mind. I feel mildly insulted, but her perception is fair: I had begun the conversation announcing that I hated them.

And that’s true. I do hate the protestors. I don’t hate them because I disagree that it’s their right, and I don’t hate them because I love it when college kids get brutalized by police. I don’t even hate them because I disagree with them: I think that their argument is compelling and that divestment is just. Simply, I find them annoying. I find it annoying that, for the most part, they are just as affected by the brutality of the war in Gaza as I am, yet their response is to throw a temper tantrum, worsen the lives of their classmates, and disrupt the functioning of a civil society that brings so many people joy. I ask myself how many young adults will never be able to experience graduation due to a few protestors' obnoxious demands for attention. I wonder how many police officers and national guardsmen will be dragged away from their families to maintain order as idiots run around trying to assault Jews with sticks. I wonder how many students will be expelled because they’ve been convinced by their friends and their social media feeds that this brazen, reckless, and meaningless behavior somehow supersedes the importance of their education. These protestors believe that the best way by which they can bring change to their university is not by shaking hands, making deals, and greasing wheels, but by making signs, yelling chants, and sleeping on grass. I despise that a generation of activists believe that they can get their way by accusing their institutions of complicity in genocide, as if such allegations made in such a way ever provoked any reaction but defensiveness.

I think that these protests are the expression of a larger crisis in American politics, an attitude eating away at civil discourse in this country. They are one variation on a worryingly common political attitude that supposes that the best way to do government is the loudest way to do government, that, with enough impressive speeches before enough roaring crowds or enough likes on a contentious tweet, you can somehow cheat the code of the game, overload the computer and reload it with your intended outcome. This perspective is a delusion, perpetuated by populists and demagogues. Fashionable on the right among Freedom Caucus Republicans and their cohort of principled, uncompromising radicals who enter into the political realm, not to participate in good faith, but to make certain people’s lives worse, it is a root cause of political deadlock and polarization. They use mass media to pretend to advance their own fringe agenda, whether to satiate some deep-seated egomania or, worse yet, because they legitimately believe in their methods.

Government, in a democracy, functions through collaboration, not domination. The movement to cleave the United States off from the rogue state of Israel cannot be led by such irresponsible individuals, who know only the rhetoric of division and sneering condescension. Good politics begets good government. Engaging with the political establishment in good faith by establishing open lines of dialogue between community elites and constituents must be a superior, more productive method of engaging in politics. A week after Arab-Americans in Michigan rallied to deny Joe Biden a large percentage of his share in the primary vote, Kamala Harris began calling for a cease-fire in Palestine and Biden began dropping air-dropping aid to Gazans. Of course, other factors were influencing their decisions, but the timing is striking. The Arab-American voters in Michigan, mourning the loss of their family members in their country, were almost certainly a factor in pushing the Biden administration towards a more humanitarian position; and they didn’t even get beaten down by overly zealous national guardsmen in the process.

Today, at Columbia University, student protestors have made it clear that they are prepared to violently resist an ultimatum to move from their camp or be expelled. I regard this state of affairs as a disaster. As Americans, we must rise above the trends of the world and defy this conflict by not lowering ourselves to our basest, most tribal senses. Victory will not come about by insult or injury. Our government can work if people give it the opportunity to do so. Speeches and gumming up the gears of power do not yield results. Really engaging with politics, acting in a respectable way that makes a politician’s interests one’s own interests, is what makes democracy worthwhile.